Machine learning and algorithmic muscle aside, there’s plenty of human intervention that goes into mapping India’s roads, buildings and landmarks.
The boyish voice on the other end of the line has a tell-tale Telugu inflection. It belongs to someone who used to work 10 minutes away from Google’s Hyderabad campus. The company that employed him was GlobalLogic, an offshore vendor for a handful of mapping services, including Google Maps, TomTom, and HERE. He asks not to be named, so we’ll call him M for attribution.
One had contacted a swathe of former and current GlobalLogic analysts—that’s what mapping operators are called—after learning that not everything in Google Maps is the end result of juiced-up machine learning. M is one of …
Roshni is a features writer and former editor of The Morning Context's Chaos team. Her career spans The Ken, Reuters, the Hindustan Times and DNA. She is a recipient of the UNFPA Laadli award and was shortlisted for the RedInk Awards 2016 for her story on Mumbai’s leprosy colonies. Her far-flung ideas would sometimes drive our editor-in-chief Ashish up the wall, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way (even if he didn’t admit it).
roshni@mailtmc.com